Inter-sections.net : Feedback

Comment on Feedback by Neeraj

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:41:05 +0000

Nice article again, good reading but very theoretical.

One of the feedback that we have in all software companies especially service sector based is status report. This is used by clients to track projects being serviced at their vendor.

In my experience I have seen people just take it as drudgery and make report so it looks good and meaningful, resulting in it being vaguely accurate.

So it is consistent, vaguely accurate, timely, but takes some effort. However, most of the information is made up to match the qualities mentioned above. But still everyone uses it to do something

How can we improve on it. You said you work with service sector company in Pakistan. What kind of information you like to track about and in what format. Does it help. I am curious to know.

Comment on Feedback by daniel

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:50:58 +0000

Hi Neeraj,

Thank you for your comments.

Project status reports are a good example of useful feedback that’s often not done right. The problem with a lot of these status reports is they tend to actually not be accurate at all in many cases.

Most status reports I’ve seen are not only vague, but also completely inaccurate. For instance, they’ll gather status by going around the team and asking them whether they’re “Red, amber or green” (for late, maybe late, or on schedule). They don’t bother basing it on any real numbers.

Then they aggregate this data pseudo-scientifically and come up with an overall flag (usually Amber). That’s not actually helpful, since it doesn’t actually reflect the status of the project.

On the other end of the scale, you have the large consulting companies with their three dozen metrics (Budgeted Cost of Work Completed, Actual Cost of Work Completed, blah blah blah), which are really accurate but require a lot of effort to keep up.

For the kinds of projects I’m involved in (medium sized web projects), a better middle-ground is to plan out the remaining tasks, assigning them relative weights (like, 1, 2 and 3), and then draw a simple graph of how many are left against time, to see whether at the rate you’re currently going through those items, you’ll be done on time.

Bear in mind this is only for schedule feedback, but for that purpose it works very well. Other things you might want to get feedback is how well the users like the product - probably ten times as important as the schedule feedback.

If you want more information, pick up some Agile development books (“Manage It!” is a very good one) and you’ll see many examples of good project feedback.

Hope this helps. I’ll probably write an article about this sometime :-)

Daniel

Comment on Feedback by Neeraj

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:40:17 +0000

Thank you for the prompt response. It helped. I will check out the book you mentioned.